Torrential Downpour
That’s what data can feel like.
Think about your inbox. When was the last time you could see all your actionable items in a single windowpane? I work hard to maintain Inbox Zero, but sometimes I struggle. Occasionally, I deserve a reward.
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But the fact of the matter is that managing our inboxes isn’t fun anymore. It should be fun, because it’s our primary means of business communication.
A ways back, Mozilla announced that they were going to fix this.
Raindrop aims to be a sort of intelligent inbox filtering system that kicks minor messages and notifications to the sidelines while foregrounding messages from Mom and other important people you actually know.
Raindrop also wants to pull in messages from Twitter, Facebook, IM, and eventually any other communication platform with an API. Direct messages and @replies would be seen as more important and therefore foregrounded over regular not specifically to you messages. The idea is to make a people-centric communication tool that brings your various services together in one interface, instead of constantly playing a game of “find that browser tab” when you want to check up on a particular conversation or thread. (Dybwad)
Everything lives everywhere. There are too many clicks and pageloads. Is it so hard to fix this?
There are some tools, but there isn’t an all-in-one solution. For instance, Threadsy gets points for being browser based, but it only includes some of the data paths I’m concerned with. Also, I can’t configure how it looks. I’m still not really in control.
At this point, Raindrop is taking baby-steps. There’s a lot of room to usurp their hopes. But if not them, someone will eventually figure this out. They will make lots of money. And if they can figure out how to make it work seamlessly with Outlook server data, I will connect to it intravenously.